


After 03x12 (The King George Job)

by PseudoLeigha



Series: (More) 2AM Conversations [42]
Category: Leverage
Genre: Gen, It's a pomsky, Its name is Megabyte, Who else forgot that Hardison has a dog?, because reasons
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-05-02
Updated: 2017-05-02
Packaged: 2018-10-26 19:03:35
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,036
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10792860
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/PseudoLeigha/pseuds/PseudoLeigha
Summary: Hardision and Sophie discuss collateral damage.Sophie's POVApparently when I say 'we'll have Sophie's POV soon,' what I mean is, in three months when I get around to writing this series again.





	After 03x12 (The King George Job)

Sophie liked to think she ran if not a _better_ , then at least a more _supportive_ team than Nate. She had done her best in his absence not only to keep Leverage going, but also to teach and encourage the younger trio – Parker and Hardison, especially – to broaden their skill-sets. She thought it made her occasional demands that they do something entirely outside their comfort zones seem more like a challenge to meet than Nate’s callous assumptions that they could and would do anything he deemed necessary, all reason and feasibility be damned. And on the occasions that she _did_ demand some nigh-impossible task of her people, she made a point of congratulating them on their success and thanking them for their efforts.

Parker never appreciated this, of course, and it had backfired spectacularly the last time she had tried to congratulate Hardison on Nate’s behalf (after the whole hypnotism debacle), but she still thought it worth the time and trouble to track them down and let them know their work was noticed and recognized. Whether they knew it or not, thanking people was a well-established way of building connections, and team-members who knew that their contributions were appreciated were happier, more productive team-members. With Nate pushing hard to exploit their new tie to Moreau, they would need all the stability and productivity they could get. Not to mention, of course, that it was a matter of common courtesy to say thank-you when the occasion warranted it, and foraging a colonial-era diary from scratch in under forty-eight hours certainly qualified.

Thus it was that Sophie made her way to Hardison’s penthouse apartment the day after they landed back in Boston. Eliot had finally insisted that they needed a day off, in the face of Nate’s manic insistence that they begin work on the Federal Witness Job right away, and Hardison’s unwavering willingness to do so, despite not having slept more than ten hours collectively over the duration of their jaunt to London. The poor boy had been nearly dead on his feet – so much so that he had not even complained when the hitter insisted that he be escorted to his own home, rather than simply crashing on Nate’s sofa for a few hours – though that might, the grifter would concede, have been due to the fact that Parker had been enlisted to help him off to bed, rather than because he recognized the necessity of a good night’s sleep.

She rang the bell, and on hearing no movement on the other side of the door aside from the scrabble of his dog’s paws on the tile, knocked patiently. So far as she knew, the youngest member of the team had arrived home nearly sixteen hours before. Knowing as she did the preferred sleep schedules of her teammates, she had waited until well after noon to make her way across the city, and it was now nearing two o’clock. If he wasn’t up yet, he really should be.

When she grew bored of waiting, she set to picking the lock. While she would never, she suspected, be as quick at this sort of thing as Parker, she had had a life before meeting the blonde thief, and an ability to let oneself into places one really oughtn’t to be was nearly as valuable a skill to a grifter as a burglar.

After consoling the anxious Megabyte (a recently-acquired, slightly-neurotic pomsky that Parker had come to accept only because he was clearly more terrified of her than she was of him, and, in her words, resembled a stuffed animal more than an actual dog), she knocked gently on Hardison’s bedroom door.

“Hardison?”

“Hmm – wassat?”

“Hardison, it’s Sophie.”

“Soph? Wha’time’s’it?” the hacker mumbled, from the sound of it, into his pillow.

She smiled softly. “It’s just gone two, Alec. Time to get up.”

He moaned something that might have been a rather indistinct ‘five more minutes.’

She laughed and cracked the door open. “Go get him, puppy,” she whispered, urging the small, excitable dog into the room as she headed toward the kitchen to make tea.

Hardison appeared nearly ten minutes later, clad only in pajama bottoms, rubbing sleep from his eyes and making a face as he felt the stubble on his cheeks. “Mornin’, Soph,” he muttered, taking the cup she offered and making a face when he realized how little sugar she had added to it.

“Afternoon,” she corrected.

He nodded. “Yeah, that.”

“Someone seems to have left muffins for you,” she noted, pointing at a plastic-wrapped plate.

“Gloria’s a saint,” he sighed, though he made a face on biting into one before looking at the note tucked under the edge of it. "Zucchini-apple chocolate chip?” he read in a tone somewhere between disbelief and betrayal.

“Ooh, gimme,” Sophie demanded, fluttering her fingers for a muffin, which he obligingly passed across the kitchen bar. It was very good, though admittedly she understood why the man would have been taken aback, if he hadn’t been expecting zucchini bread. “So tell me about this Gloria,” she suggested teasingly as he fished around in his fridge for a bottle of orange soda. “I thought you and Parker…”

He snorted. “I wish. Glory’s my dog-sitter, the kid from 3B. She’s like, fifteen, sixteen. I let her crash up here when I’m gone as long as she cleans up after herself.” He yawned broadly. “Not that I don’t like to see you, but what’s up? I though’ we had the day off?”

She shrugged. “We do. I just thought I’d come by and let you know how impressed I was by your work in London. You really could have had a career as a forager, you know. And I appreciate the effort and the artistry it took for you to accomplish it so quickly.”

“Thanks, Sophie,” he answered with only the slightest hint of awkwardness, which matched his self-satisfied, but slightly bashful expression. He really wasn’t recognized enough for his contributions, Sophie thought, regardless of the fact that he had made a habit of pointing out exactly how brilliant he was to the rest of the team.

She grinned. “There’s no need to thank _me_. This job… we couldn’t have taken Keller down without you, so really, I should be thanking _you_.”

He peered curiously at her from the other side of the bar. “Yeah, I noticed that this job was really getting’ to you. Was it just that London’s your home turf?”

She sighed. She supposed she should have expected this line of questioning from Hardison. Eliot wouldn’t care, and Parker probably wouldn’t notice, but Hardison did pay attention to people, and cared enough to ask when he saw something amiss. In her defense, she had thought him too preoccupied to realize that she had been in a state since she had seen that little girl detained. “It’s… partially that,” she admitted honestly, before adding, somewhat reluctantly, “but more… what do you know about what I used to do, before Leverage, I mean?”

He scratched his head and touched his chin lightly, obviously thinking of the research she knew he _had_ to have done on her previous exploits. “Sophie Devereaux shows up for the first time in reports from France in… 1991, and then pops up all over the world for a couple decades like Carmen Sandiego. Art thievery and fraud, mostly. Annie Croy started earlier, ’85, right?” Sophie nodded. “Some links to organized crime, mostly as a fence, lots of connections in smuggling and the black market. I think all the other aliases you gave me to check up on were more recent, more art theft. Well, art and artifacts. I haven’t had a chance to look into Charlotte Prentice, yet.”

The grifter smirked. “You won’t find anything on her,” she said with a certainty carefully calibrated to hide the spike of regret that still plagued her when she thought of William and the life they could have had together, if only she could have brought herself to tell him the truth (and if only he would have forgiven her the lies). “I never did get around to using Charlotte for the game I had intended.”

He raised an eyebrow at her, but she declined to volunteer more information. “So why’d this one get to you?” he asked after a moment.

She twisted her face into a rueful expression. “I… you know most of my marks were high-society gents, the sort of rich wankers who could afford the loss. Some of them probably considered it worth it, for the thrill and the story of being taken for a ride. I don’t have any regrets about conning _them_. But… I don’t have any guarantee that the fences and smugglers I used were any better than Keller. Some of them I know were just as bad. And I haven’t used any of them in years – decades, even, but… I just feel guilty, I suppose, for ever having contributed to that sort of thing.”

Hardison hummed slightly, picking at his muffin. “You know,” he said after a time, “that ain’t the worst thing anyone on the team’s ever done. Not by a long shot.”

“Are you hiding some deep, dark, tragic past?” she joked, smirking gently at him.

He smiled sadly. “No. But Eliot is. And some of the jobs we’ve pulled as a team… just didn’ sit right with me, y’know? There’s always _some_ kind of collateral damage. But… I can live with that because we’re helping people. If that means that people lose their life’s savings when the stock for a company we ruin goes down, or they lose their jobs because we fooled them or stole their identities or whatever… I try to think of it as the cost of correcting a corrupt system. Not our fault, you know? Or not _only_ our fault. Part of it’s a product of like, a paradigm shift. Some people have to lose out, because knowingly or not, they were contributing to supporting a bad _status quo_.”

Sophie frowned, more mildly than she really wanted to, given that she hadn’t really given much thought to the consequences of their jobs before. “I’m not really sure what you’re trying to say,” she said, because quite frankly, she couldn’t see any way in which pointing out that Leverage had resulted in just as much collateral damage as her earlier jobs might have done, was intended to make her feel better.

He shrugged. “Me either. It’s early.” She raised an eyebrow at him, and looked pointedly at the clock. He rolled his eyes “Hey, I’ve only been up for like, half an hour. I’m just sayin’… maybe it’s just… unavoidable, hurting people sometimes. Even like, normal people, citizens, they might hurt people without knowing it, like working for JRP or Wakefield. But what we do now… it’s better than just… bein’ ignorant an’ goin’ after whatever you want, whether that’s stealin’ art or earnin’ a paycheck. It helps more people than it hurts, in the long run, Leverage.”

“You really believe that?” Sophie asked, giving him a skeptical look.

He smirked. “Yeah. I do, actually. Anyway, it definitely helps more people than ripping off rich old geezers and publically insured banks. We’re changin’ the world, if you think about it right.”

The grifter thought that was either the wisest or most naïve thing she had ever heard the hacker say. Possibly both. She gave him a genuine smile. “Well, then, here’s to helping people and changing the world,” she laughed, lifting her teacup in a false toast. He tipped his soda bottle toward her in response, then watched in bemusement as she shrugged on her jacket and slung her purse over her shoulder.

“I’ll see you tomorrow,” she said, by way of farewell.

“Yeah, see you tomorrow,” he nodded, covering a yawn with one hand.

She turned back at the door with a smile and said again, “And Hardision? Thank you.”

There was no hint of hesitation in his, “You’re welcome,” this time, though he sounded, if anything, more surprised than he had earlier. She wondered idly if he realized why she was thanking him as she headed toward the elevator. She rather thought he might.


End file.
